Our group includes PostDocs, PhD students, and student assistants, and is headed by Prof. Dr. Hasso Plattner. If you are interested in our work or want to join our team, please contact Dr. Matthias Uflacker.

Our team is giving a series of lectures and seminars with a focus on enterprise systems design and in-memory data management. Strong links to the industry ensure a close connection between theory and its implementation in the real world.

Our research focuses on the technical aspects of business software and the integration of different software systems to meet customer requirements. This involves studying the conceptual and technological aspects of in-memory databases, design principles, and programming methods for enterprise applications.

We continually strive to translate our research into practical outputs that improve the quality of enterprise applications. A close link to industry partners ensures relevance and impact of our work. Get here an overview of our current and previous projects.

Elastic Online Analytical Processing on RAMCloud

Using shared DRAM as persistence for an in-memory DBMS

A shared-nothing architecture is state-of-the-art for deploying a distributed analytical in-memory database management system: it preserves the in-memory performance advantage by processing data locally on each node but is difficult to scale out. Modern switched fabric communication links such as InfiniBand narrow the performance gap between local and remote DRAM data access to a single order of magnitude. Based on these premises, this project introduces a distributed in-memory database architecture that separates the query execution engine and data access: this enables a) the usage of a large-scale DRAM-based storage system such as Stanford's RAMCloud and b) the push-down of bandwidth-intensive database operators into the storage system. We address the resulting challenges such as finding the optimal operator execution strategy and partitioning scheme. The project demonstrates that such an architecture delivers both: the elasticity of a shared-storage approach and the performance characteristics of operating on local DRAM. In our project, we created AnalyticsDB which is a prototypical analytical query processor with a pluggable storage layer.

Open Positions

We are proud to announce " A Course in In-Memory Data Management" by Prof. Dr. h.c. Hasso Plattner. This book is the culmination of six years work of in-memory research. As such, it provides the technical foundation for combined transactional and analytical workloads inside one single database as well as examples of new applications that are now possible given the availability of the new technology. The book is available at Springer.